Berkeley
Writers at Work Series
Features Scheper-Hughes Feb. 2

Nancy
Scheper-Hughes, one of the nation's foremost anthropologists, will be the
featured writer for the Berkeley Writers at Work series Monday, Feb. 2,
from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the Toll Room of Alumni House. She will read
from her works, be interviewed about her writing process and answer questions
from the audience.

Scheper-Hughes received both her BA and PhD from Berkeley and has written
extensively and lectured throughout the world on topics from "AIDS
and Human Rights in Cuba" and "Popular Justice and Human Rights
in a South African Squatter Camp" to "Maternal Thinking and the
Policies of War."

She has been invited to speak or teach at universities in Canada, South
Africa, Brazil, Israel, Hong Kong and France.

Scheper-Hughes writes on a variety of subjects: gender and reproduction;
violence and everyday life; the practice of anthropology; and deviance,
madness and social control.

Her book "Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in
Rural Ireland" (1979) won the Margaret Mead Award from the Society
for Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association.

Reactions in the village of "Ballybran" to the book were more
mixed. One Irish countryman said, "Yerra, she should be shot!"

In addition to a heavy schedule of scholarly writing, she has always
maintained a parallel commitment to writing for the public in such venues
as Natural History Magazine, a fairly regular stream of articles for the
British magazine The New Internationalist and editorials in the L.A. Times
and the New York Times on subjects ranging from the cultural politics of
international adoption to the assassination of Brazil's street kids and
the increasing commercialization of human organs and living donors in transplant
surgery.

In "Death without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil,"
(1992), Scheper-Hughes examines how extreme poverty and hunger in northeast
Brazil have created a culture in which mothers not only do not mourn the
death of sickly babies, but in fact have developed behaviors that hasten
the death of those children. Commonweal magazine called this a "searing
treatment of how social and economic injustice has created forces that deprive
mothers of what would seem to be the most basic of human rights, the right
to grieve for their dead babies." Library Journal said, "What
makes the book as exciting to read as a good novel is (Scheper-Hughes')
long-term interaction with a group of people that she clearly loves and
the complete lack of the sense of the 'other' that is so often found in
anthropological writing."

"Death without Weeping" won several book awards and prizes
(including one in Italy and one in the United Kingdom) and was nominated
for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Book of Non-Fiction
(1993).

The Berkeley Writers at Work series provides a forum for campus writers
to discuss all aspects of their writing, from gathering material and crafting
the framework to creating a mood, editing and revising.

The series is sponsored by College Writing Programs, with support from
the dean of undergraduate education. It is free and open to the public;
no reservations are needed.